Certain Songs
by sakuuya
Summary: Fifty TMM ficlets inspired by 50 random songs. Various pairings, genres, and AUs.
1. Chapter 1

**Certain Songs: A 50 Songs Challenge**

First of all: I admit 100% that I stole the idea for this collection from the lovely and talented GypsyxSilent's "If the Beat's Still Strong." But she took her idea for _that _collection from another theme collection I did, so I'm not particularly ashamed of myself.

So, in case you're unfamiliar with "If the Beat's Still Strong" (and I can't stress enough that it's full of cool ideas and you should go read it), the way this works is that I put my iPod on shuffle, wrote down the first 50 songs that popped up, and will write ficlets based on each song. Aside from all the ficlets only featuring TMM characters, there's no set POV, genre, rating, set of pairings, or anything, and the themes should not be assumed to take place in the same world as each other even when they're _not _AU—and yeah, some of them are going to be AU.

Also, like Gypsy, I'm pretty much using this collection as a placeholder to get myself back in the habit of writing, so it will update unpredictably and probably very slowly—not that that matters so much, because again, there's no overarching plot happening here. I'll be posting sets of five ficlets whenever I have five ficlets ready.

**Disclaimer: **I don't own any of the characters who appear in the following ficlets, nor do I own any of the inspiring songs.

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**01. "No Children" – The Mountain Goats**

"I heard you and Ryou broke up," Ichigo said cautiously, not really sure what was the best way to approach the subject this time. Minto shrugged.

"Of course we did. He's a bastard. I mean, you know he's a bastard, right?"

Ichigo bit her lip and nodded. She wouldn't have described Ryou like that, even if she _used_ that kind of language, but she'd seen enough breakups (mostly Minto's breakups, now that she thought about it) to know that sometimes people just needed to vent and didn't actually want you to try and be sensible. She hoped that if she ever broke up with Masaya—not that she wanted to break up—that she wouldn't be quite so... weird about it.

"I can't imagine how we ever thought it would work out between us," Minto continued with a wave of her perfectly-manicured hand. She was more elegant now than she had been at thirteen, and Ichigo was glad to be in a stable relationship if someone who looked like Minto couldn't hold down a boyfriend. "We're too much alike, I think. It was like spending all my time with another me, and can you imagine how annoying that could get?"

"Gosh, I wouldn't have any idea how annoying hanging out with _you_ could be," Ichigo teased. Minto laughed and slugged the shorter girl companionably in the shoulder.

"Fine, then," she corrected herself. "It was like spending all my time with a much less charming version of myself—and don't you say anything!" she added, seeing Ichigo open her mouth to sass back. "I hate that bastard."

"So you're done with him for good now?" Ichigo asked hopefully. At twenty, she felt way too old to still be dealing with her friends' romantic drama.

"Well..."

"Minto!" Ichigo exclaimed. Yep, that had definitely been too much to hope for. She sighed. "So, when are you seeing him again?"

"Friday."

**02. "Dentist" – Steve Martin**

Pai heard the crash and winced. As the ship's physician it was his job to patch up the other two even if (and this was an educated guess on his part) they hurt themselves being idiots. And, indeed, when he dared to look outside, he saw Taruto and Kishu lying in the hallway in a tangle of limbs, grinning like maniacs.

"What happened?" Pai asked with a sigh. They just smiled stupidly back at him, clearly too pleased with themselves to admit to whatever they had been doing. "Fine, I don't want to know." In a flash, he grabbed a syringe—full of experimental plant growth formula, not that he was about to tell them that—off a table in his lab and waved it at them. "I'll fix you up. Who's first?"

They left him alone after that.

**03. "Wig in a Box" – John Cameron Mitchell**

Keiichiro hummed to himself as he wiped the counter down. He loved running a busy business, and the Mews were all lovely girls, but it was nice to have a bit of peace and quiet at the end of the day. Honestly, there were days when he wouldn't mind too much if this was his whole job, if he didn't have to worry about saving the world.

"Sheesh, it's dark in here," Ryou said as he climbed up the stairs. "I have cat genes, and_ I_ can barely see find my way around!" Keiichiro smiled, blinking back the bright spots when Ryou flicked on the kitchen light.

"Maybe you should spend more time in the kitchen, then," he teased. "You'd get used to it."

"Hell no!" Ryou replied eloquently. Keiichiro _tsk_ed.

"I clearly raised you wrong."

Ryou came over to him and took the sponge out of his hand. "Forget about cleaning. I've got an emergency downstairs that I could really use your help with."

Keiichiro nodded and put the sponge back in the sink. Wishful thinking aside, he was fine with throwing himself back into world-saving mode. He would be whatever Ryou needed him to be, even if that meant that the counters stayed messy.

**04. "T.O.Y (Team of the Year)" - Adam Warrock**

Berri Shirayuki gratefully took the cup of hot tea from Ringo Akai's outstretched hand. Ringo flopped down on the bench beside her and eyed her white ice skates suspiciously.

"That looks scary," the younger girl said, biting her lip. "Are you sure I can't just wear my boots?"

"Aw, you'll be fine," Berri replied with a smile, breathing in the warmth of the tea. "Besides, you're part penguin, aren't you? This should come naturally!"

"Penguins don't have foot-knives," Ringo pointed out sensibly. Berri bent down and grabbed the pair of small red skates she'd rented for Ringo. "Oh! They're actually pretty cute when they're little like that!"

"Hey, are you calling my feet big?" Berri asked, laughing. Ringo's eyes went wide, and she clamped her mitten-clad hands over her mouth. "Relax," Berri added gently. "I was kidding. I know you didn't mean it like that. But they are pretty cute skates, aren't they? Put your feet up on the bench and I'll help you get them on."

Once Ringo's skates were on, Berri stood up, the blades of her own skates sinking a little into the snow, and offered the younger girl a hand. Ringo looked down doubtfully, wondering how she would be able to stand up on those little blades, but she let Berri pull her to her feet. Walking on her skates in the snow was weird, but it wasn't actually _difficult_, certainly not as difficult as she had imagined it was going to be.

So she was pretty confident when they came to the edge of the rink. Berri stepped onto the ice first. Ringo followed and immediately fell down on her butt.

"Are you okay?" Berri asked, gliding over to where Ringo sat.

"Fine," she replied, rubbing her sore rear end. "Ice is _hard._"

"Well, yes," Berri said as she helped Ringo up. The younger girl was still shaky on her feet, but Berri was a good enough skater that she could support Ringo without both of them falling over. Together, they slowly made their way around the oval of ice, Ringo occasionally letting out gasps of excitement or fear.

"Berri?" she asked after a bit of skating.

"Yeah?"

"Thanks for taking me skating. I wish the others could be here."

"Me too, but I don't mind too much. I like just hanging out with you. And besides, us new Mews gotta stick together!"

Sticking a little _too _close to the older girl, Ringo tripped again and pulled Berri down into a laughing heap.

**05. "Wolf Like Me" – TV on the Radio**

"Good, good! Sexy! Feral! I love it!"

Zakuro tried to focus on posing as the flashbulbs went off in her eyes. She was used to this, more or less—she'd never done high fashion before, true, but she was used to being on camera—but the lights were affecting her more than usual.

It was a good thing this was an "edgy" shoot instead of one where she was supposed to look soft and beautiful. Ordinarily, she was good at soft and beautiful, but right now, feral was about as much as she could manage. She itched all over, and she had to suppress the urges to gnaw at her hands and use a foot to scratch behind her ears.

"Growl for me!" the photographer called in his heavily-accented Japanese. Zakuro did as she was told, baring teeth that she could _feel _growing longer than human incisors. Hopefully, everyone would think it was really good makeup. "Great!"

As she contorted her body for the camera, she could feel her knees trying to turn backwards, but the photographer kept shouting encouragement and praise, so maybe she was just imagining the feeling that all her pores were about to burst into fur. She kept up what was apparently very good work and tried not to think about how much everyone around her smelled like meat.


	2. Chapter 2

**Certain Songs: A 50-Song Challenge (#6-10)**

Thanks to everybody who reviewed last chapter! It's pretty encouraging to know that people are even reading my weird scraps. I'd like to give a particular shout-out to **GypsyxBells**, because, as I said last chapter, this fic wouldn't exist if not for her.

**Disclaimer:** _Tokyo Mew Mew_ and all related characters belong to Reiko Yoshida and Mia Ikumi, and all the songs mentioned herein belong to their respective artists.

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**06. "God Only Knows" – The Beach Boys**

Ever since he found out about Deep Blue, Masaya had sort of hoped that his misanthropic streak was the alien's fault. Keeping up his facade all the time was frankly _exhausting. _Plus, for the first time in his life, he had found a human being whom he really loved _and_ a way to be blameless for his dislike of the rest of them. When he was with Ichigo, he felt like a whole person.

Unfortunately, Ichigo was a social creature, and now that the rest of the ex-Mews had gotten to know him well, keeping up appearances was getting harder, even with Deep Blue gone. The first time he had been surrounded by Ichigo's laughing friends and thought _if I don't get out of this, I'm going to go crazy_ he'd been crushed that he was still himself, not some alien whose hatred of the human race might be understandable. But he shouldn't have been surprised. Ichigo was a wonderful person, but she was just one girl. Nothing had really changed.

**07. "Can't Get You Out of My Head" – The Flaming Lips (covering Kylie Minogue)**

Ichigo's dreams that night were full of lush jungles and the smell of the sea. She was the fastest girl in the world, a streak of light crashing through verdant leaves on an island that was, by the logic of the dream, perfectly familiar to her, though she knew she'd never been there before. There was someone behind her, whose tawny-eyed presence made her home suddenly unsafe.

But the intruder had made a mistake in trespassing on her domain, and Ichigo suddenly couldn't remember why she was running. She skidded to a halt in the heavy underbrush and crouched down, her fear crystalizing into a hard edge of anticipation that paralleled the pop of her claws. Her every muscle sang as she waited for her prey to come into view.

After a small, frozen eternity, her quarry dashed out from behind a tree. She pounced.

While she was in the air, her claws retracted of their own volition, and her paws lengthened with an awful _CRACK_ into soft, pale hands. Her body, too, lost its coiled power as it grew, and, her balanced ruined, she landed on the jungle floor with a rib-rattling crash.

She was taller, much taller, now that she was in this useless form, yet her former prey somehow towered above her in a way that he hadn't a moment ago. As she cowered like the naked animal she was, he advanced on her, his eyes phosphorescent in the gloom.

Always, every night before tonight, she had awoken in the instant before his too-pale hand touched her skin, but now she knew, indelibly, that he was as cold as death, even in the equatorial heat of the jungle, and she could see frostbite flowering where his fingers brushed her arm.

Leaf by leaf, the jungle fell away, and she realized all of a sudden that the two of them were floating in space. Her big, soft body was even less useful among the stars, and the man who had hounded her out of her place of power kept her tethered with thin, strong fingers curled like a hawk's talons around her wrist. His arm was an unbreakable beam of ice between them, colder even than the void that Ichigo just now realized was chilling her to her marrow.

He smiled down at her, and Ichigo saw his predator's teeth; wondered how she hadn't known all along. He mouthed something at her, words too quiet or too foreign for her mind to parse, but she felt them as though he had branded her with iron, whorls of unbearable heat against her frozen skin. She writhed, trapped between his icy grip and the invisible fire that poured from his mouth, but here, so far away from her little island jungle, there was nothing for her to defend herself with, and sooner or later, she would shatter or melt.

**08. "At Last" – Neko Case**

Retasu didn't even have time to think_, Isn't water supposed to be soft?_ before the breath was knocked out of her lungs. She sunk like hope, too stunned by the way she'd slammed into the ocean to even flail much. The chimera anima that had kidnapped the little boy was nowhere to be seen—not that she could see much of anything. The saltwater burned her eyes, and she thought, _I'm never going to find my glasses at the bottom of the ocean_ even though she hadn't been wearing them when she jumped in. Even though they would have done nothing for her steadily-darkening vision.

She was going to die here, she knew. Ever since she was a little girl and her father had tried to teach her to swim, she'd had periodic nightmares of slipping away into dark water with nary a splash to mark her grave. Jumping into the ocean after that chimera anima was probably the dumbest thing she'd ever done in her life, rash and insane.

That almost made it worth it. In all her dreams, the water had reared up like a dragon and carried her off, or appeared suddenly below her feet so she fell before she had time to scream. She'd never, in all her years of nightmares, dived into the sea on purpose, let alone done so to save someone's life. Heck, she'd barely ever done _anything_ rash. _If I die now, at least I died making the brave choice_, she thought, and the thought buoyed her upward until she crested high above the waves, her new tail flashing in the sunlight.

**09. "Slacks" – Trip Shakespeare**

By this point, Ichigo wasn't even surprised that Kish flew down at her while she was in her civilian form. What _did_ surprise her was that he was wearing a pair of what were clearly Earth pants, and proceeded to thrust his hips uncomfortably close to her face.

"You like, Kitten?" he asked with a smirk. "I got these especially for you."

Once Ichigo had backed up enough to reclaim some of her personal space, she saw that Kish clearly didn't know how to shop for Earth pants. These were too baggy for him, and the color just looked queasy with his skin tone and ever-present midriff top.

She didn't have time to dwell on it, though, because at that moment, Ryou jogged up to her, wearing an equally ill-fitting pair of pants.

"Damn, Kish is already here?" he muttered. _His _pants were far too short, but unlike Kish, he had no excuse: How could Ryou not know how to find pants that fit?

"Can you guys leave me out of whatever this is?" she asked. "I'm waiting for Masaya." Just then, her phone buzzed in her pocket. "Hello?"

"Ichigo?"

"Masaya! Where are you? Did something happen?" _He _usually wasn't the one who was late for their dates. Ichigo tried to focus on him and ignore the argument Ryou and Kish were having a couple feet away from her.

"Well, uh, this is a little embarrassing," Masaya admitted. "I can't go out today because someone stole all my pants."

**10. "The Living Dead" – Phantom Planet**

She still wasn't used to Tokyo being empty. The sun was setting between the skyscrapers, and Minto had to find somewhere to sleep, fast. She couldn't just break into any random building, since if she could do it, so could anyone else. No, what she needed was somewhere that was both open and barricadable. It would help if it wasn't an obvious hiding place, but the sky was getting dark, so she couldn't afford to be picky. She hugged the parcel she was carrying to her chest and hurried through the city.

In her directionless flight, she was surprised to find herself within a block of the old café. It had been boarded up for years, now, since long before Keiichiro had died, and in all that time, neither of them had had any reason to go back there. The place was full of bad memories, but, she reasoned, nothing in there could be worse than what waited for her outside, probably converging on her position even as she pondered her situation.

Minto knew the secret entrances to her old headquarters, and apparently whoever had shut the place up didn't, because she got into the basement with no trouble. Slowly, and with some difficulty, she pulled a heavy bank of inoperative computer equipment in front of the passage she'd entered through. It wouldn't stop them, if they were determined enough, but it would give her enough time to escape again.

After she had explored the place to make sure that it was, in fact, empty, she set her package down on one of the tables in the dust-blighted front room. Looking at the state of this place, she was struck by a pang of sadness for the human race. But she shook it off. She had kept fighting after all the others had fallen, even after she'd lost Keiichiro. She wouldn't let this place turn her into a blubbering fool.

The thing she had been carrying so carefully was a nondescript gray box, a far cry from the colorful weapons Keiichiro and Ryou had developed before everything went to hell. She'd completed it days ago, but hadn't had a quiet place to use it since then. She extended the box's antenna, punched her activation code into its little keypad, and waited as it whirred to life. Nowadays, Tokyo was one big graveyard, and within minutes, she heard the moaning of the unquiet dead from outside the café's walls.

So let the aliens come for her. They'd killed off the human race, but Minto's machine worked, and humanity was rising from its grave.


End file.
